Strenuous Historian

THE JOURNALS OF FRANCIS PARKMAN (718 pp.)--Edited by Mason Wade--Harper ($10).

According to a Harvard classmate, Historian Francis Parkman suffered from "Injuns on the brain." Even on a tour of Switzerland, he sat on a rock "fancying myself again in the American woods with an Indian companion." His ailment, if such it was, gave strength and color to some of the most readable history written by any U.S. scholar (The Oregon Trail, The Conspiracy of Pontiac). Parkman was born a Boston Brahmin, but spent much of his life covering, on foot and on horseback, the wild Western ground he was to write about. His journals, in some respects more valuable than his books, disappeared in 1904, barely mined by scholars. Biographer Mason Wade found them in overlooked drawers of Parkman's Boston study in 1940, has edited them with care and prefaced them with candor.

Parkman was a puritan with a romantic streak, a social snob, a mentally and physically sick man who exalted the strenuous life and cracked under it. The Journals, which cover trips to New England, Canada, Florida, the Northwest and Europe, are as remarkable for what Parkman missed as they are for the precocious talent with which he described what interested him. He was only 17 when he made his first entries, but he had already decided to become an historian. At 23 he made his tour of the Oregon Trail, wrote his most famous (but far from his best) book during the next three years. The Oregon Trail journal, as Editor Wade points out, is better as history, and more readable, than the book written from it. The reason: illness and near-blindness forced Parkman to dictate, a method which soon became as "easy as lying." The Oregon Trail was then edited by prissy Harvardman Charles Eliot Norton and "carefully bowdlerized of much anthropological data and many insights into Western life which seemed too crude to his delicate taste."

Raw Buffalo Liver. Parkman lived with the plains Indians just before they took to the warpath to halt the whites. Often he traveled with only two companions, but, Boston gentleman that he was, always carried calling cards. He learned to eat boiled dog and to like raw buffalo liver, and discovered that the noble savage of Novelist James Fenimore Cooper was a library creation. Parkman thought Indians "not much better than brutes. . . ."

His fellow whites didn't fare much better. He was charmed by the Lake George country of New York State, but found it "occupied by a race of boors about as uncouth, mean, and stupid as the hogs they seem chiefly to delight in." He reserved his greatest contempt for Englishmen. Looking down from the cupola of St. Paul's in London: " 'Now,' thought I, 'I have under my eye the greatest collection of blockheads and rascals, the greatest horde of pimps, prostitutes and bullies that the earth can show. . . . Was there ever such a cursed hole?' '

Savages v. Monks. Wherever he went, Traveler Parkman was on the lookout for materials to chink the huge structure of his gigantic France and England in North America. He spent a week in a Roman monastery studying the life of Catholic priests, because Catholicism had helped build New France. Later he wrote: "I was led into a convent by the same motives that two years later led me to become domesticated in the lodges of the Sioux Indians at the Rocky Mountains, with the difference that I much preferred the company of the savages to that of the monks." Yet in Sicily he wrote: "I reverenced it [Catholicism] before as the religion of generations of brave and great men--but now I honor it for itself. They are mistaken who sneer at its ceremonies as a mere mechanical farce: they have a powerful and salutary effect on the mind."

Editor Wade neither defends nor apologizes for the prejudices and shortcomings of his "heroic historian." What Wade wrote five years ago in his Francis Parkman, a full-dress biography, is now borne out by the journals: "he would hardly be considered the model of the impartial historian today. . . . Puritan that he was, he disliked the puritans most cordially; republican that he was, he loathed democracy and fought its growing influence. . . . Long buried in his work and isolated by his illness and his means, at his death he was already a monument to a vanished era and an anachronism."

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